US Commander: Take Nukes Off High Alert or Risk Hackers Starting a War

 

Retired Gen. James Cartwright — who was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before retiring in 2011 — told the Associated Press that “de-alerting” nuclear weapons could reduce the likelihood of launching them in response to a false attack warning.

Just adding a little more time necessary to launch — which would do nothing to affect the deterrent value of the weapons — could make all the difference, said Cartwright, who was also the head of Strategic Command from 2004 to 2007.

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Cartwright said that its an idea that should be revisited since “the sophistication of the cyberthreat has increased exponentially” in recent years.

Hagel’s No-Nukes “Global Zero” — They Cheat, We Don’t

“Treaties are like pie crusts, they are made to be broken” -Vladimir Lenin

The United States is willfully committing national suicide.

Generally it means that even the severely reduced number of warheads deployed in our arsenal would not — if they were needed in a crisis — be available for use. If that in fact took place — with countries hostile to the US having arsenals in excess of the US force — it would probably be in irresistible invitation to them to attack.

Former Senator Chuck Hagel, nominated to be Secretary of Defense, is also a signatory of what is known as the “Global Zero” plan. It calls for the United States and Russia to begin comprehensive nuclear arms negotiations in early 2013 to achieve zero nuclear weapons worldwide by 2030 in four phases.

The first phase would be a reduction of the US nuclear arsenal to 1,000 weapons from its current level — some number slightly less than 5,000 warheads. While the US has now deployed 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons, the new total would include stored and reserve weapons, as well as warheads considered tactical and deployed in Europe, and therefore not regulated by current arms control agreements. By way of comparison, the former head of the US Strategic Command laid out in a summer 2012 essay the comparable Russian arsenal, which he estimated was probably in excess of 10,000 nuclear warheads — a number considerably higher than many current and previous estimates of the Russian nuclear arsenal, and nearly twice that of the United States.